Posts Tagged freelance
How I got art for my game, part 4.
Posted by The Management in art, projects on November 20, 2009
First of all, we finally have a brand new site! It’s where all future Tribes of Mexica updates will go, but since I started these art posts here, I figured I’d finish off the series with one more entry.
In part 3, I finally got a background and all the necessary character artwork, but there were still plenty of missing assets that had to go into the prototype.
Our controls/tips screen used stock controller/button images supplied by Microsoft. These were edited a bit and given unique backgrounds to better fit the style of the game.
I asked my younger brother (who’s a graphic designer) to do some menu backgrounds and a custom font for us. Larabie Fonts is a good place to snag these or look for templates, so I didn’t expect it to be a huge amount of work. I gave my brother $100 and figured he’d be done in a day or two, but then the requirements kept on piling up.
Button icons, a tutorial screen, custom battle messages, etc.; none of these had to be done from scratch as there were plenty of references, but the quantity of UI elements grew to be far more than a weekend of work could cover. We didn’t have a lot of money, but I gave my brother another $100 for all this extra work.
Some spell icons...
We also needed some icons for the spells and status effects, so I asked Alice (who did our cover) to help with these illustrations. I also liked the Street Fighter esque health bars my brother did as they gave Tribes of Mexica a fighting game vibe, so I requested a few portraits to accompany them.
In total there were 12 spell icons, 12 status effect icons and 8 portraits, with a bit of palette-swapping/layering to cut down on the work. Alice was quite comfortable with this and we paid her $200 for all the images.
Finally, we needed some spell effects. Initially we wanted to have the same studio that did the character art to also create the spell animations, but they were too busy. We asked some other artists that we knew if they’d be interested, but they either didn’t have the time or were not well suited for the task. In the end, I posted another ad on ConceptArt.
...and some enemy portraits.
Out of all the responses, I chose to go with Rafa? Kwa?ny. Rafa? seemed like a good fit as he had some impressive CG animations and was willing to do the work for $200. I paid him a $75 advance and we talked over the details of all the spells, but then he simply disappeared. I e-mailed him a few times but never got a response, so I filed complaint with PayPal. Eventually PayPal “recovered” $0.53 of the $75.00 and promptly closed the case.
With just a few days left until the deadline of the DreamBuildPlay competition, we had to scramble to come up with an alternate solution. We bit the bullet and implemented some particle effects which I didn’t think there was time to do, and I paid my brother another $100 to create some static images for this system. This was the part of the game that got the least amount of polish, but I was still quite happy with the end results.
On top of all this, I also messed around with a bunch of art stuff myself. I trimmed, cropped and resized some of the UI pieces, and — having previously asked for our background to be split into multiple layers — created 7 different arenas from one template.
4 of the 7 backgrounds in our prototype which were all based on a single template.
This was done by moving, flipping, scaling and cloning individual layers and altering the level/colour balances of the entire image. These edits were somewhat noticeable if you took a closer look at the final backgrounds, but they were not the focus of the game and the rough spots were worth the extra variety.
Overall we created Tribes of Mexica on a shoestring budget, and the artists involved contributed partly because they were interested in the experience and the project’s visual themes. I wouldn’t necessarily count on the same level of support in the future if we couldn’t raise a bit more money, but it was definitely a positive experience that helped to frame our approach for dealing with contract work.
Previous Tribes of Mexica post.
How I got art for my game, part 3.
Posted by The Management in art, projects on August 16, 2009
Having decided to move away from pixel art, I returned to ConceptArt.org to search for higher-res artists. Although my preference was for a style resembling Alice’s, I was open to other interpretations. After all, the characters would have to take on more deformed proportions to properly fit the dimensions, so there was no point in disqualifying CG renders, sketch-animations, etc.
Warrior concept by Daniel Hansen.
The requirements for the job stayed about the same:
- 1 background, 1280×720, with some decorative objects that could be moved around.
- 1 “unit” type consisting of 4 different colour versions, with each version comprising 8 angles (3 of them simply flipped) and 4 animations per angle.
- 4 different enemy types, with 4 animations per enemy and one or two special animations.
I kept the $800 as the initial offer for this work. I was prepared to see this figure fluctuate based on the utilized style and its requirements, but I also thought it was good starting point.
As I found out prior to making my post, ads that pay more than $500 have their own section on ConceptArt and require a $50 fee to be posted. Since I previously had a positive experience with the site, I decided the price was worth it. Our IncubatorGames profile, though, listed us as a group, and I made the payment under my name, Radek Koncewicz. As a result, there was some confusion over the post and it didn’t initially go up, but the matter was quickly resolved after I contacted some of the forum administrators.
All in all, the ad generated about 50 responses.
Animation mockups by Jesus Garcia, Tom Garden, IMGNATION and Decebal Tache.
Now the thing with pixel artists is that most of them create tiles, objects, animations, etc., as a matter of course. However, with illustrators animations are much more of a specialty. Lots of submissions showcased amazing background and character work, but very few contained examples of animations. This had me a little concerned, so I decided to request some mock-ups. Not wanting to alienate any of the artists, I offered $20 each for a simple animation test. It wasn’t a lot, but it was better than nothing. From our point of view, it also quickly added another $120 that we had to spend (although one of the artists was nice enough to actually send the money back when we didn’t choose him).
This turned out to have been a very good idea. The results were varied in style and quality, and really helped to showcase each individual’s ability to interpret and produce based on our directions. I realize that extra mockup payments might not always be feasible, but I highly recommend this extra step if things seem uncertain.
In the end, we decided to go with IMGNATION, a Brazilian art studio that had worked on videogames in the past. They accepted the $800 fee, with the only “extra” being a request to be credited in the game (which I was going to do anyway for all the contractors involved).
The finished background. I ended up playing around with it in Photoshop to create the 7 different backgrounds we had in the demo.
The people at IMGNATION who worked on Tribes of Mexica were Marcus Severo de Moura, Rafael Batista Sarmento and Orlando Fonseca Jr., the studio’s project director. I only ever talked to Orlando, and initially he broke down the tasks as follows: background, 30% of the work, units, 20% of the work, and enemies, 50% of the work. Eventually the workload proved to be closer to: background, 20% of the work, units, 30% of the work, and enemies, 50% of the work.
Working with an actual studio meant that it was a bit harder to play things by the ear, but it also meant that — as a business — they’d work hard not to miss any deadlines. Gearing up for our own deadline, it was definitely nice not to have to worry about art deliverables being late.
The final background we received was great, and the animations were nice despite relying a lot on transformations (movement, scaling and rotations that are the staple of Flash “tween” animations). Granted IMGNATION was working on these animations while we were putting together a rough system to play them in the game, so things were not as optimized as they could have been. Hopefully this process will be improved in the future as we develop and fine-tune more tools.
With the core and concept art out of the way, we had all the vital components. However, there were still plenty of other visuals missing, which I’ll cover in the next entry.
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About
Hi, my name’s Radek Koncewicz, and I work as a videogame design consultant. I'm also the creative lead of Incubator Games, a small development studio I started with a few former coworkers.
I think a lot about videogames, and write a lot of it down too, so I figured why not make it public?
If you'd like to contact me, drop me a line at themanagement@significant-bits.com.